Fund for Teachers - The Podcast

In the United States, 6.4 million children between the ages of 4-17 have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and about 1 in 54 children are identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder . Those statistics are heightened at Ledyard Middle School in Gales Ferry, CT , where one-third of the student population receives either special education services or 504 accommodations for ADH...

According to The New York Times article, “How Do We Tell A New Generation of Teenagers About the Vietnam War?” the majority of ground troops in Vietnam were teenagers and those who had recently been teenagers. This is exactly the age group that Rachel Eastman teaches United States History at Clear Creek High School in League City, Texas, 30 minutes southeast of Houston. A home-schooled student fro...

In the video Sarah Kirk submitted for the Oklahoma School Counselor of the Year last year – an honor she subsequently won -- she quoted a report stating that if students have just one person who loves and believes in them, their outcomes are far greater. “Well,” Sarah said, “I want to go beyond that. I want to be the one person who is absolutely crazy about them. I want them to know that this is m...

On the morning of March 11, as the coronavirus began closing schools and teachers began considering what remote learning might look like, Trina Harlow (a veteran art teacher) pondered what she could do to support her peers attempting to teach a tactile subject over Zoom. She created the Online Art Teachers (K-12) Facebook group , primarily as a service project of sorts – for art teachers/by art te...

Wartime efforts during World War 1 were quite peculiar. President Woodrow Wilson fed a flock of sheep on the White House lawn to cut down on landscaping costs. Germans experienced a ban on bratwurst so the intestines of cows could be redirected toward making Zeppelins. And in Russia, Czar Nicholas II banned vodka to keep everyone’s head in the game. More than a century later, one wartime effort fo...

American historian Jacques Barzun said, “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” The national nonprofit Fund for Teachers is out that change that. Frustrated with society’s lack of appreciation and respect for educators, Fund for Teachers strives to honor teachers as the professionals charged with preparing our students for productive futures. Since 2001, Fund for T...

When Rodney Ward's eighth grade math students came to him asking questions about the coronavirus, he answered them with algebra. He now teaches 129 students in an elective, online course called "Coronavirus Math & Modeling." We visit with this UC Berkeley grad, veteran teacher and FFT Fellow about this and additional classes that are silencing students' moan: "When wil...

In 2019, Zach Rondot used his Fund for Teachers grant to attend the 6th World Summit on Positive Psychology in Melbourne, Australia, where he learned the principles of Positive Education. He now applies insights he gained in his fourth grade classroom at Costello Elementary in Troy, MI. In this episode, taped during the first week of distance learning due to COVID-19, Zach shares his experiences a...

In 2017, Lauren Greenspan and Julia Handelman were teaching in Columbus, Ohio, where they experienced students’ social emotional distress on a daily, hourly basis. In response, they founded the Youth Yoga Project to be a part of the solution that meets the emotional needs of all K-12 students. Their solution remains rooted in teaching, but now Julia and Lauren teach teachers how to implement their...

In the summer of 2018, while Eric Levine’s students might have been reading dystopian novels about a worldwide pandemic, he was working alongside epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Today, Eric is teaching teachers with the information he acquired and engaging students in real-life learning about the medical and social justice components of a public health crises – such a...